I am a Colorado-born Canadian citizen of the Cherokee Nation, appointed as Professor in the Department of English and the First Nations and Indigenous Studies Program in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies. My work in Indigenous literary studies takes up questions and issues of kinship, belonging, sexuality, personhood, and nationhood, and engages historical, political, aesthetic, and representational contexts and concerns. Increasingly I have been interested in the intersections between Indigenous literatures, speculative fiction, and the other-than-human. My published work includes Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History, the animal cultural history Badger, the Indigenous epic fantasy trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder, and have edited and co-edited numerous works, including The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature (with James H. Cox), and the literary manifesto Why Indigenous Literatures Matter (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2018), another animal cultural history (this time Raccoon), and a new dark fantasy series. More information about my work and commitments can be found on my website, http://danielheathjustice.com/.

My primary teaching appointment is in First Nations and Indigenous Studies, but I work closely with a number of graduate students in English and will occasionally teach a course in the Department. I am delighted to work with current and potential graduate students in the field of Indigenous literary studies, and would also welcome discussions with students interested in speculative fiction, sexuality and gender, animal studies, and cultural studies.

“Renewing the Fire: Notes Toward the Liberation of English Studies,” Readers’ Forum, ESC: English Studies in Canada 29.1-2 (2003): 45-54.

Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Literature and Expressive Culture (Tier 2): This project focuses on “critical kinship” as a descriptive analytic for some of the diverse ways that Indigenous writers, performers, artists, and culture workers articulate healthy and sustainable models of relationship and belonging, especially as enacted through diverse human and other-than-human kin relations. It includes publications that take up issues of “critical kinship,” support for collaborative research clusters that connect Indigenous scholars and artists from across North America and the Pacific, and community-engaged arts interventions that support the work of queer/two-spirit Indigenous culture workers as they envision and enact diverse, culturally connected models of kinship.

The People and the Text is a 5-year SSHRC funded research project (2015-2020) linking Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars and students through the production of an online annotated bibliography of Indigenous-authored and some “as-told-to” texts from the beginnings of Indigenous literacy in English or in English translation to the symbolically significant date of 1992, with a focus on the ethics and cultural protocols of production and dissemination. Website: www.thepeopleandthetext.ca.